By  Elizabeth Monkus, Kaitlyn Filip, Jennifer Won Young Lee, and Hanna Sharif-Kazemi

Since early 2020, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers have been evaluating the Domestic Violence Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County, with a specific focus on the Domestic Violence Courthouse at 555 West Harrison in Chicago. Today, we release our findings in our report, “Slipping through the Cracks” – An Evaluation of Cook County’s Domestic Violence Division in Chicago. The consolidated Domestic Violence Courthouse opened in 2005 at 555 West Harrison in Chicago, in response to growing concerns about crowding, case processing times, and safety concerns with the conditions in the existing court buildings at 1340 South Michigan (for criminal proceedings) and at 28 North Clark Street (for civil proceedings). The consolidated courthouse hears all Orders of Protection cases, both criminal and civil, and was structured to create secure waiting areas with the intent of keeping petitioners and respondents away from each other in the courthouse. In addition to safety goals, the courthouse was intended to improve case efficiency. In 2010, the Circuit Court of Cook County established the Domestic Violence Division to further these goals. Beyond a task force study of the DV Court in 2008 and another more limited study in 2021, both convened by Chief Judge Evans, there has been no comprehensive study of the efficacy of the courthouse. Our report seeks to remedy this.

Background & History

When the Courthouse opened in 2005, there were around 50 dedicated domestic violence courts in the country. By 2010, there were over 200. This growth in domestic violence courts offers an opportunity to examine the successes and failures of Cook County’s courthouse while discovering alternatives to the processes which may improve its functionality. The courts are increasingly called upon to fill in gaps for diminishing social safety resources. This is especially evident in family courts, like those hearing domestic violence issues, and has profound implications for understanding systemic bias. Just as society’s conception of domestic violence has shifted over 50 years, so has our understanding of how poverty and marginalized identities are criminalized and otherwise punished by systems of power. It is incumbent on courts to examine if and how practices support biased systems and seek correction to those practices.  In February 2020, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts was invited by a group of advocates and attorneys working in the Domestic Violence Division to join them in designing and implementing a court-watching project, given rising concerns over management and culture in the Division. Our goal in doing so was to improve not only access to courts, but the quality and function of justice within those courts.  For this study, Chicago Appleseed and the Council conducted interviews with more than 35 attorneys, non-attorney advocates, community service providers, court staff, and judges between July 2020 and March 2022. These interviewees provided information about their direct experiences in the Domestic Violence Division—in both the branch courts and the Chicago courthouse—as well as about their general experiences serving the needs of both survivors, their families, and perpetrators of harm. Likewise, Chicago Appleseed’s court-watching program deployed volunteers to observe 188 domestic violence cases in the Circuit Court of Cook County February and March of 2022. This qualitative information, along with background research into jurisdictional differences and best practices, provided information for our analysis. Nonetheless, we ran into several limitations in our research, including an inability to access quantitative data on the courts, which meant we could not fully understand things like sociodemographic information of litigants or length/outcome of cases, as well as issues connecting with litigants to interview about their direct experiences in the courthouse. Our findings and recommendations, therefore, are based in the analysis of interviews and observations with reference to background research.

Summary of Findings & Recommendations

Our findings stress that the courthouse is critical infrastructure and the Division is structured in an appropriate manner, but identify four major deficiencies:

1. Systemic racism and sexism, which is evident in the structures and procedures of the Domestic Violence Courthouse;

2. A general disconnect between judges and court staff and the needs of litigants, which is exacerbated by technology and training issues and limited operational capacity;

3. Judicial culture and bias, lack of trauma-informed practice, and the need for training, which severely impacts quality of justice; and

4. Issues with the Clerk of the Court’s Office, which are consistent and pervasive, creating barriers to access for both litigants and attorneys.

Broadly, it appears that the Domestic Violence Division is under-resourced to address these needs and (at least until recently) there has been a cycle of neglect regarding community concerns about the court, which exacerbated these barriers to justice.

 Chicago: Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers., 2022.    91p.

By Brady United

On February 5, 2019, a group of New Mexico Sheriffs, acting under the umbrella of the New Mexico Sheriffs’ Association (NMSA), surprisingly issued a Declaration opposing common sense gun violence prevention (GVP) bills being considered by the state legislature. These sheriffs pressured local and state politicians to oppose these measures that aim to protect the public safety and lives of New Mexicans. The sheriffs’ effort resulted in 25 counties passing so-called “Second Amendment Sanctuary resolutions,” including resolutions designed to undermine the American system of checks and balances by expressing support for sheriffs who unilaterally announced that they would not enforce such public safety laws. Brady immediately suspected that the gun lobby was behind the effort to encourage these sheriffs to go rogue and not enforce the law. Accordingly, Brady filed requests for documents from each of these sheriffs’ offices under New Mexico’s public records act (IPRA). The documents that Brady has obtained thus far show how the NRA infiltrated the NMSA; the prevalence of conspiracy theories among these sheriffs; their disregard for the American system of checks and balances and the rule of law; and a worrisome dedication to not enforcing laws aimed at protecting the lives and public safety of their own constituents.  

Washington, DC: Brady United Against Gun Violence, 2019. 8p.

By Nancy Lieberman Charities 

  In 2016, the Dallas, Texas, community and its police department faced one of its most brutal days. That summer, a standoff and shooting in downtown Dallas resulted in the deaths of four Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers and a Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer. The lone shooter was motivated by his perceptions of police racism and brutality toward African American people. Barely a week after the shooting, then-chief David Brown called Basketball Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman to discuss using Dream Courts, a core program of Nancy Lieberman Charities that builds state-of-the-art outdoor basketball courts in underserved areas, as a tool to help heal divisions in the city. The mission of Nancy Lieberman Charities was not originally oriented toward law enforcement. Nancy Lieberman Charities is an education and wellness nonprofit organization focused on assisting underserved youth in the educational field. But as a result of that conversation, we developed our Kids & Cops programming, which has now been deployed in partnership with law enforcement agencies on Dream Courts across the country. The Kids & Cops initiative aims to make basketball more accessible to kids by giving them an inexpensive recreational outlet, a safe place to play, the chance to interact socially, and a path to learning the importance of teamwork and good sportsmanship. It is a sustainable program to help build and strengthen the bond between local officers and their communities. Our goal is for this guide to give law enforcement agencies an alternative perspective on serving the community as a law enforcement agency or agency partner. Nancy Lieberman Charities is not a task force or law enforcement agency—rather, we are an organization with an outside perspective on positive community relationship building.   

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.  2023. 24p.

By Frank Rudy Cooper 

There is a new police criticism. Numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed blacks between 2012 and 2016 sparked the movements that came to be known as Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, and so on. That criticism merges race-based activism with intersectional concerns about violence against women, including trans women. There is also a new police resistance to criticism. It fits within the tradition of the “Blue Wall of Silence,” but also includes a new pro-police movement known as Blue Lives Matter. The Blue Lives Matter movement makes the dubious claim that there is a war on police and counterattacks by calling for making assaults on police hate crimes akin to those addressing attacks on historically oppressed groups. Legal scholarship has not comprehensively considered the impact of the new police criticism on the police. It is especially remiss in attending to the implications of Blue Lives Matter as police resistance to criticism. This Article is the first to do so. This Article illuminates a heretofore unrecognized source of police resistance to criticism by utilizing diversity trainer and New York Times best-selling author Robin DiAngelo’s recent theory of white fragility. “White fragility” captures many whites’ reluctance to discuss ongoing racism, or even that whiteness creates a distinct set of experiences and perspectives. White fragility is based on two myths: the ideas that one could be an unraced and purely neutral individual—false objectivity—and that only evil people perpetuate racial subordination—bad intent theory. Cop fragility is an analogous oversensitivity to criticism that blocks necessary conversations about race and policing. Blue Lives Matter exemplifies false objectivity when it asserts that police should be their judges of what is appropriate in law enforcement. Likewise, Blue Lives Matter relies on bad intent theory when it implies that only a few “bad apples” create racial disparities. Cop fragility is dangerous because it blames the victims of police misconduct, constructs a false victim status for the police, and undermines civil rights. Racial minority communities will only give police the cooperation they need if they perceive the police to be listening to them. This Article’s specific proposal is for police departments to hold mediated listening sessions with the new police critics based on a proven methodology for mediating difficult conversations. The goal is to identify reforms that would rebuild community trust of the police. These listening sessions hold the potential to turn police resistance to criticism into meaningful cooperation 

622 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2020       

By Hayli Millar, Yvon Dandurand , Marcella Chan With the Assistance of Abeni Steegstra, Raelyn O’Hara, and Kia Neilsen 

The international community is attempting to eliminate forced labour and the worst forms of child labour, including hazardous work likely to harm children’s health, safety, or morals. Child and forced labour can be present at various points of a company’s supply chains, often out of sight of buyers, labour inspectors, and consumers. Many governments have resorted to legislation to motivate companies to be more transparent about their supply chains and to adopt due diligence measures to prevent child and forced labour. At present, there is no specific supply chain transparency legislation in Canada. Canadian private companies under applicable securities legislation do not have an obligation to disclose material labour exploitation risks within their supply chains. Given the complex, evolving and often obscure nature of supply chains, too many Canadian companies fail to offer consumers any meaningful environment, social or governance disclosure. As a result, consumers are unaware of whether the products and services at local Canadian retailers have connections to human rights abuses or detrimental environmental practices. At the same time, companies increasingly feel the pressure from investors, consumers, NGOs, industry associations and others to disclose and address the risks of labour exploitation in their supply chains. To prevent and eliminate child and forced labour, a new statutory framework may be needed to clearly define the transparency and due diligence obligations of enterprises throughout their operations and supply chains. In their efforts to prevent and combat child and forced labour globally, national and regional governments are increasingly turning to mandated disclosure (transparency) and due diligence regimes as an indirect method of regulating corporate behaviour throughout various supply chains. Recent disclosure laws require companies to provide information on their global supply chains, including due diligence measures that they have taken to prevent human rights violations by third-party suppliers. Some of these laws now extend beyond targeted due diligence in preventing child and forced labour and apply more comprehensively to the prevention of human rights violations and harmful environment practices. There is also a growing tendency for these laws to impose some specific due diligence or duty of care obligations on the companies they cover. Effective monitoring, investigation and enforcement mechanisms then become necessary to ensure accountability, along with ensuring access to judicial and non-judicial remedies for those whose rights have been violated. The thematic focus of this Guide on forced labour and child labour is intentional and timely given that 2021 is the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour – 2021.1 The Guide was developed to assist policy makers and legislators, in Canada and elsewhere, in making policy choices and designing  legislation that will achieve an optimum impact on the elimination of child and forced labour. The Guide presents and discusses a range of legislative options and examples that policymakers and legislators may wish to consider in the development of supply chains transparency and due diligence legislation. The goal being to establish a statutory duty of care requiring businesses to take reasonable steps to avoid the use of forced labour, child labour, and human trafficking in their operations abroad, and to report publicly on these due diligence steps and their impact. The Guide fits within the broader international anti-slavery policy developments of the last decade or so, including the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the global standard for corporate human rights obligations. The development of effective legislation may be more urgent than ever given the fact that the major supply chain disruptions caused by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are not only responsible for slowing down the economic recovery, but also weakening the capacity of enterprises to ensure that their supply chains are not buoyed by child or forced labour. As businesses embark on the journey to recovery, supply-chain leaders are resorting to various strategies to make their supply chains far more flexible and agile, including dual sourcing of raw materials and near-shoring, or regionalizing their supply chains. As business leaders are seeking to deeply and quickly transform their supply chains, new risks emerge that must be managed in order to prevent child labour, forced labour and other human rights violations within their supply chains. At this time, many businesses are looking to establish and improve their dedicated supply-chain riskmanagement functions and processes and adopt voluntary standards for environmental, social and governance. They could be persuaded to include due diligence and reporting practices in these processes to manage the risks and potential liability associated with suppliers and partners that are less scrupulous about preventing human rights abuses. Failing to address human rights issues can create significant business risk.2 There is certainly a lot of interest among businesses in how to measure and report their social impacts and many of them have adopted voluntary standards. However, states must act to ensure that businesses do more than “launder their reputation”.3 The Guide is divided into two main parts. A first part establishes a context for the guidance offered, including a cursory review of the Canadian legislative landscape and the international policy framework for responsible business conduct. A second part offers a discussion of the various choices a legislator must consider in designing a supply chains transparency and due diligence statute that can hold business enterprises accountable for their efforts to prevent child labour and forced labour. That second part has six main sections: 1. The purpose, scope, and application of the legislation 2. The designation of the entities to be covered by the legislation 3. Creating disclosure and reporting obligations 4. Creating specific due diligence and accountability obligations 5. Complaints and grievance mechanisms, and potential remedies 6. Responsibility for the administration and enforcement of the law. The specific due diligence obligations imposed by the legislation The reader will also find two tables at the end of the Guide, one summarizing existing international standards and policy guidance instruments and one summarizing the main features of various relevant national legislation. For those readers already familiar with the Canadian context and the applicable international legal standards, they may find it easier to start with Part 2 of the Guide.   

Vancouver, BC:  International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy , 2022. 83p.  

By William Cai, Johann Gaebler, Justin Kaashoek, Lisa Pinals, Samuel Madden, Sharad Goel

Past studies have found that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than White drivers to be pulled over by the police for alleged traffic infractions, including a combination of speeding and equipment violations. It has been difficult, though, to measure the extent to which these disparities stem from discriminatory enforcement rather than from differences in offense rates. Here, in the context of speeding enforcement, we address this challenge by leveraging a novel source of telematics data, which include second-by-second driving speed for hundreds of thousands of individuals in 10 major cities across the United States. We find that time spent speeding is approximately uncorrelated with neighborhood demographics, yet, in several cities, officers focused speeding enforcement in small, demographically nonrepresentative areas. In some cities, speeding enforcement was concentrated in predominantly non-White neighborhoods, while, in others, enforcement was concentrated in predominately White neighborhoods. Averaging across the 10 cities we examined, and adjusting for observed speeding behavior, we find that speeding enforcement was moderately more concentrated in non-White neighborhoods. Our results show that current enforcement practices can lead to inequities across race and ethnicity.

PNAS Nexus, Volume 1, Issue 4, September 2022, 

By The Honorable Edwin Meese III and John G. Malcol

It is a time of change and transition for many in America’s law enforcement community. Across much of the nation, police and sheriffs find themselves on the front lines of the opioid crisis, struggling to deal with the scope of the epidemic and the new challenges and dangers to officers it presents. At the same time, communities are increasingly turning to law enforcement officials to address other issues, such as dealing with disruptive or downright violent individuals suffering from mental illness, placing still further demands on these departments. tackling these diverse and multitudinous missions without compromising community safety is often a difficult proposition, particularly in light of the budgetary and resource constraints many law enforcement agencies face. All the while, police and sheriffs are facing internal pressures as experienced officers retire and departments work to attract young, talented recruits and diversify their ranks. those tasks are made all the more difficult by persistent narratives in mainstream and social media that paint policing as “systemically racist”—and which have the effect of encouraging antipathy towards the profession. What is needed now are thoughtful, innovative approaches to tackling these challenges. In this effort, America’s midsize police departments and sheriff’s offices are helping to lead the way. these agencies are large enough to test solutions applicable to much larger departments, but small enough to remain agile and adaptable in the face of changing circumstances, making them well-suited to serving as laboratories of innovation. Recent history bears this out. Some midsize departments have discovered creative means of overcoming funding limitations to properly equip their officers. Law enforcement leaders have developed new programs for community outreach and engagement, which have built trust and eased tensions within their jurisdictions. Some have demonstrated the value of better educating their officers on history—including the undisputed fact that many agencies once enforced racist laws (or neutral laws in a discriminatory manner)—to build empathy and reduce tensions with members of the community. And departments are increasingly training officers in tactics and techniques to de-escalate confrontational situations, as well as employing new technologies—such as data-driven policing, body-worn cameras, and even drones—to improve their operations. With these issues in mind, in January 2018, the Heritage Foundation convened its second policing.  Strategy Summit. While the 2017 summit focused on the major cities’ police and the nation’s largest departments, this summit brought together a diverse group of leaders from midsize law enforcement agencies across the country, along with representatives from national law enforcement organizations, police unions, and professionals with extensive federal, state, and local experience. As was the case with the first Policing Strategy Summit, this meeting had three principal objectives: 1. Identify the most pressing problems that law enforcement agencies face today, including the breakdown in trust, adequacy of training, proper use of new technologies, media, and community relations, and the gathering and sharing of data; 2. Identify the best practices and most innovative approaches that law enforcement authorities are employing to address these problems and combat crime; 3. Identify the most effective means of communicating with public and political leaders, building trust improving police-community relations, and bringing the needs and concerns of police agencies to the attention of federal officials. the following represents the proceedings of the Policing Strategy Summit. It does not necessarily reflect the views of specific attendees or organizations but seeks to capture the wide-ranging discussion that took place at the summit.   

Washington DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2024. 31p.

By Ben Grunwald, John Rappaport, Kyle Rozema

We investigate the labor market consequences of police discipline for serious misconduct. To do so, we use data on employment for all Florida law enforcement officers and on 1,818 incidents of misconduct recorded by the state licensing board between 2000 and 2016. We find that discipline increases at least sixfold the likelihood that an officer separates from their department and the likelihood that their law enforcement career in Florida ends. We also find, however, that unions protect officers from at least one-fourth of the consequences of discipline. Our results suggest that the common narrative that police officers wear a badge of impunity is not always accurate.

Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2024-55,

By Akshay Jain, Rajiv Sinclair, Andrew V. Papachristos*

Explanations for police misconduct often center on a narrow notion of “problem officers,” the proverbial “bad apples.” Such an individualistic approach not only ignores the larger systemic problems of policing but also takes for granted the group-based nature of police work. Nearly all police work is group-based and officers’ formal and informal networks can impact behavior, including misconduct. In extreme cases, groups of officers (what we refer to as, “crews”) have even been observed to coordinate their abusive and even criminal behaviors. This study adopts a social network and machine learning approach to empirically investigate the presence and impact of officer crews engaging in alleged misconduct in a major U.S. city: Chicago, IL. Using data on Chicago police officers between 1971 and 2018, we identify potential crews and analyze their impact on alleged misconduct and violence. Results detected approximately 160 possible crews, comprised of less than 4% of all Chicago police officers. Officers in these crews were involved in an outsized amount of alleged and actual misconduct, accounting for approximately 25% of all use of force complaints, city payouts for civil and criminal litigations, and police-involved shootings. The detected crews also contributed to racial disparities in arrests and civilian complaints, generating nearly 18% of all complaints filed by Black Chicagoans and 14% of complaints filed by Hispanic Chicagoans.

PLOS One May 2022

By The Police Executive Research Forum

 The U.S. Department of Justice and the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) released a first-of-its-kind set of best practices for police-press interactions at mass demonstrations. The report resulted from a convening of police leaders and journalists, spearheaded by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and PERF, and supported with a grant from the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The report, “Police-Media Interactions During Mass Demonstrations: Practical, Actionable Recommendations,” proposes that police establish clear policies before, during, and after a protest event. A primary recommendation is that police agencies adopt express “arrest avoidance” procedures that direct officers to let detained journalists go quickly and that journalists be explicitly exempted from dispersal orders and curfew enforcement. The report also recommends that while credentials are an easy way to identify working members of the news media, police should also recognize those “acting as journalists in function and behavior.”  The Reporters Committee's Bruce Brown said that “With a fraught election next month, we have a unique opportunity with these best practices to both protect journalists at protests and help police serve their public safety mission. The challenge now is to get the recommendations in the hands of police departments and newsrooms around the country.”

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. 40p.

By the United States Department of Justice.  Civil Rights Division and United States Attorney’s Office For the Southern District of Mississippi 

Hours after the Department of Justice announced its investigation of the Lexington Police Department (LPD) on November 8, 2023, officers chased a Black man through a field and tased him nine times. The man began foaming at the mouth. One officer pointed to a Taser probe lodged in the man’s hat and said, “Damn, one of my probes hit him in the head.” The man, who has a behavioral health disability, had been accused of disturbing a business. This was not the man’s first encounter with LPD. Earlier that year, LPD officers had jailed him for ten days for trespassing; four days for stealing a cup of coffee; and twelve days for stealing packets of sugar. Each time they arrested him, LPD unlawfully refused to release the man until he paid money towards old fines and fees he owed from misdemeanors and traffic tickets. But each arrest added more fines and fees to the ledger. By November 2023, the man— who has no job, no assets, and no bank account—owed more than $7,500. In encounter after encounter with the man, LPD violated his rights. But like countless people in Lexington, the man had little recourse. Through a combination of poor leadership, retaliation, and a complete lack of internal accountability, LPD has created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law. FINDINGS The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the City of Lexington and the Lexington Police Department engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law. Specifically, we find that LPD unlawfully: • Arrests, jails, and detains people who cannot pay fines or fees, without assessing their ability to pay; • Uses excessive force; • Conducts stops, searches, and arrests without probable cause, including jailing people on illegal “investigative holds” and arresting people solely because they owe outstanding fines; • Imposes money bail without justification or assessment of ability to pay; • Jails people without prompt access to court; • Violates the rights of people engaged in free speech and expression, including by retaliating against people who criticize the police; • Discriminates against Black people; and • Operates under an unconstitutional conflict of interest because LPD’s funding depends on the money it raises through its enforcement.. 

Washington, DC: United States Department of Justice. Civil Rights Division, 2024. 47p.